Thank you Mike,
basically customer wants VCS only to start or stop the application using its scripts. If the application fail, the application team should take care and handle it, not VCS. The only VCS's task should be to switch the application on or off when asked to do so. I was advising customer against it, but its customer's decision and he's paying my lunch.
I think the easiest solution here will be just to set the CleanProgram to empty quotes ("") and to apply the MonitorProgram as you are suggesting - touching some empty hidden file when the application resource is coming up and removing it when going down.
Thanks very much for your effort and time.
I appreciate it a lot!!!
ivo